Why businesses should consider co-location

For many businesses, running a data facility on-site can be an expensive headache. Issues often arise as systems grow and the IT department need to provision additional space and power, or when new policies dictate enhanced security or resiliency, but existing facilities are unable to meet these needs. Hosting large scale IT equipment on site is not without its cost and environmental issues either. The huge power consumption of IT resources contributes to hefty utility bills, which, combined with cooling requirements, leads to further costs; and if the optimum temperature and conditions are not met, there may be implications on the longevity of the servers further down the line. As applications need to be accessed by users and clients across time-zones, staffing sites 24x7 can also be difficult to deliver using in-house resources. In addition to these requirements, there are administrative costs, installation costs, and the need to negotiate with landlords and telcos. Sometimes there may also be a shortage of in-house skills to manage facilities or to manage the physical and logical security of company data or compliance.

Sound familiar? These problems can be addressed by an off-site co-location solution. IT leaders who are considering moving their equipment to a secure offsite facility have the benefit of leaning on the expertise of the datacentre provider, who can leverage much larger investments in resilient infrastructure to ensure business continuity and sophisticated environmental controls to optimise system performance; combined with expert staff that can be on site 24x7x365.

Reducing cost is a driving factor behind many moves to co-location. Businesses often discover there are many hidden costs to hosting servers and storing data on-site which can lead to escalating capital investment as well as increased operating expenses and management overheads. Co-location services can help a business increase their profitability, by cutting back on these costs whilst ensuring that company equipment and data resides in a centre with all the necessary measures in place to guarantee security and improve resiliency. Companies often have an opportunity to reduce bandwidth and connectivity costs when collocating in a third party datacentre, as well an opportunity to achieve higher network performance. Importantly if an organisation chooses the right provider, they can also future-proof their investment, buying only what they need today whilst ensuring if they grow, shrink or change their requirements in the future - they can marry costs and needs.

In cases where businesses opt for a co-location solution, the in-house team often want to benefit from all of the advantages of hosting offsite, whilst at the same time keeping control of their applications infrastructure themselves. With colocation services the provider maintains the power, environment and security policies allowing the in-house team to focus on supporting the needs of the organisation. A trusted co-location provider should take a holistic approach to understanding the unique and rigorous requirements of your business, whilst also operating in a consultative role to make sure these needs are met.

The benefits of co-location do not stop there. When considering a solutions provider, there are many business benefits to selecting a provider who can also provide managed hosting, managed application services and cloud services from the same data centre. This maximises the flexibility of the solution which can be used to support the business. In this way a customer who starts with a colocation solution to meet their immediate needs can extend their IT solution into a managed hosting or hybrid cloud configuration to reduce CAPEX and free up valuable internal IT resource to meet the demands of growing the business. The value of these extended services is clearly demonstrated when it underpins global businesses whose clients require a real time, highly secure service around the clock, 365 days a year; and who often experience spikes in demand during high profile events throughout the year.

A good example of where co-location has improved business efficiency comes from Fashion GPS, a leading digital solutions provider for sample inventory tracking and event management for the fashion industry, which currently harnesses the co-location services of NaviSite.

This successful organisation needed to move valuable client data to a secure co-location service provider quickly and reliably. They also required high uptime and performance response times, especially during high profile and busy events such as Fashion Week. Since the move to co-location, one of Fashion GPS’ largest clients, a high profile e-retailer, has seen up to 50 per cent improvement in processing speeds, and data upload speeds have also increased by over 80 per cent, which clearly demonstrates the business benefits of this co-location solution. Co-location can help companies deliver a robust and reliable service, even under pressure.

Particularly important to companies such as Fashion GPS is the adherence to the SSAE16 standard, which gives added assurance that the highest level systems, policies and procedures are being used by all staff working in the data centre.

A healthy partnership with a co-location solution provider can allow your business to lean on the expertise of your partner to establish a fully redundant disaster recovery system. Colocation can be used in combination with managed hosting services and cloud and application services to deliver a much more flexible and optimised solution for companies, boosting the quality and range of IT solutions that a company can deliver to their employees and their clients.